These eerie, dark pillar-like structures are actually columns of cool interstellar hydrogen gas and dust that are also incubators for new stars.

Dense clouds of molecular hydrogen gas (two atoms of hydrogen in each molecule) and dust that have survived longer than their surroundings in the face of a flood of ultraviolet light from hot, massive newborn stars (off the top edge of the
picture). This process is called photoevaporation.

This ultraviolet light is also responsible for illuminating the convoluted surfaces of the columns and the ghostly streamers of gas boiling away from their surfaces, producing the dramatic visual effects that highlight the three-dimensional nature of the clouds.

The tallest pillar (left) is about a light-year long from base to tip.

As the pillars themselves are slowly eroded away by the ultraviolet light, small globules of even denser gas buried within the pillars are uncovered. These globules have been dubbed 'EGGs.' EGGs is an acronym for 'Evaporating Gaseous Globules,' but it is also a word that describes what these objects are. Forming inside at least some of the EGGs are embryonic stars  stars that abruptly stop growing when the EGGs are uncovered and they are separated from the larger reservoir of gas from which they were drawing mass. Eventually, the stars themselves emerge from the EGGs as the EGGs themselves succumb to photoevaporation.

The picture was taken on April 1, 1995 with the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The color image is constructed from three separate images taken in the light of emission from different types of atoms. Red shows emission from singly-ionized sulfur atoms. Green shows emission from hydrogen. Blue shows light emitted by doubly-ionized oxygen atoms.

The Tall Whites were, as I described in book 1, when using their electronic equipment, perfectly capable of putting images in your mind if you were relaxed and calm.

Once you panicked then all bets were off.

The Tall Whites when you went on board their scoutcraft there weren't any screens.

There weren't any television screens, there weren't any computer screens.

Their eyes are like those of a cat.

When we look at a television set we see the moving pictures.

I don't believe that they see the moving picture because their vision is so good.

I believe that instead their communication equipment just puts images directly in their mind.

Does it mind to mind.

If they showed up without their communication equipment, and if none of their people had learnt to speak English, which sometimes happened, especially in a number of episodes that I have published, you were simply down to hand signals.

They weren't telepathic.

If they didn't have their equipment, you were down to pointing and gestures.

Nasa's Voyager 1 has reached the final frontier of the solar system, having traveled through a turbulent place where electrically charged particles from the Sun crash into thin gas from interstellar space.

Astronomers tracking the little spaceship's 26-year journey from Earth believe Voyager 1 has gone through a region known as termination shock, some 14 billion kilometres from the Sun, and entered an area called the heliosheath.

"Voyager 1 has entered the final lap on its race to the edge of interstellar space," Edwad Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement released on Tuesday.

Voyager watchers theorised last November that the craft might be reaching this bumpy region of space when the charged solar particles known as the solar wind seemed to slow down from a top speed of 2.4 million kilometres per hour.

Termination shock

This was expected at the area of termination shock, where the solar winds were expected to decelerate as they bump up against gas from the space beyond the solar system. It is more than twice as distant as Pluto, the furthest planet in the system.

By monitoring the craft's speed and the increase in the force of the solar wind, Voyager scientists now believe the craft has made it through the shock and into the heliosheath.

Predicting the location of the termination shock was hard because the precise conditions in interstellar space are unknown and the termination shock can expand, contract and ripple, depending on changes in the speed and pressure of the solar wind.

“Voyager 1 has entered the final lap on its race to the edge of interstellar space”

Edwad Stone,Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology

"Voyager's observations over the past few years show the termination shock is far more complicated than anyone thought," said Eric Christian, a scientist with Nasa's Sun-Solar System Connection programme.

Voyager mission

Voyager 1 and its twin spacecraft Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 on a mission to explore the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn. The pair kept going, however, and the mission was extended.

Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune, the only spacecraft to have visited these outer planets. Both Voyagers are now part of the Voyager Interstellar Mission to explore the outermost edge of the Sun's domain.

Both Voyagers are capable of returning scientific data from a full range of instruments, with adequate electrical power and attitude control propellant to keep operating until 2020.

Wherever they go, the Voyagers each carry a golden phonograph record which bears messages from Earth, including natural sounds of surf, wind, thunder and animals. There are also musical selections, spoken greetings in 55 languages, along with instructions and equipment on how to play the record.